Statism

September 13, 2016

Ordinarily, it is not a good idea to base how you vote on just one issue. But if black lives really matter, as they should matter like all other lives, then it is hard to see any racial issue that matters as much as education.

The government could double the amount of money it spends on food stamps or triple the amount it spends on housing subsidies, and it will mean very little if the next generation of young blacks goes out into the world as adults without a decent education.

Many things that are supposed to help blacks actually have a track record of making things worse. Minimum wage laws have had a devastating effect in making black teenage unemployment several times higher than it once was.

In my own life, I was very fortunate when I left home in 1948, at age 17 -- a high school dropout with no skills or experience. At that time, the unemployment rate of black 16- and 17-year-old males was 9.4 percent. For white males the same ages, it was 10.2 percent.

Why were these unemployment rates so much lower than we have become used to seeing in later times -- and with very little difference between blacks and whites?

What was different about those times was that the minimum wage, established in 1938, had been rendered meaningless by a decade of high inflation. It was the same as if there were no minimum wage.

In later years, as the minimum wage was repeatedly raised to keep up with inflation, black teenage unemployment from 1971 through 1994 was never less than 3 times what it was in 1948, and ranged as high as more than 5 times the 1948 level. It also became far higher than the unemployment rate of whites the same age.

The relations between the police and the black community are another issue that has gotten a lot of attention, and produced counterproductive results. After all the rhetoric and all the efforts towards more tightly restraining the police, the net result has been that murder rates have soared in cities where that policy has been followed -- and most of the people killed have been black.

None of the most popular political panaceas for helping black communities has a track record of making things better, and some have made things much worse.

The one bright spot in black ghettos around the country are the schools that parents are free to choose for their own children. Some are Catholic schools, some are secular private schools and some are charter schools financed by public school systems but operating without the suffocating rules that apply to other public schools.

Not all of these kinds of schools are successes. But where there are academic successes in black ghettos, they come disproportionately from schools outside the iron grip of the education establishment and the teachers' unions.

Despite all the dire social problems in many black ghettos across the country -- problems which are used to excuse widespread academic failures in ghetto schools -- somehow ghetto schools run by KIPP and Success Academy turn out students whose academic performances match or exceed the performances in suburban schools whose kids come from high-income families.

What is even more astonishing is that charter schools are being opposed, not only by teachers' unions who think that schools exist to provide guaranteed jobs for their members, but also by politicians, including black politicians who loudly proclaim that "black lives matter."

Apparently these black children's futures do not matter enough for black politicians -- including the President of the United States -- to stand up to the teachers' unions. The teachers' unions produce big bucks in campaign contributions and big voter turnout on election day.

Any politician, of any race or party, who fights against charter schools that give many black youngsters their one shot at a decent life does not deserve the vote of anybody who really believes that black lives matter.

--The New York City Council voted in May that public urination is not a criminal act.

--The San Francisco City Council decided, by one vote, to continue the city's ban on public nudity -- not, of course, on the grounds of "decency" but on the grounds of public health. Since that can easily be resolved by use of a towel on public benches and chairs, it is only a matter of time, probably a couple of years, before people will be permitted to walk around naked in San Francisco.

--A few weeks ago, teachers in Charlotte, North Carolina, were instructed not to refer to their elementary school students as "boys and girls" but as "students" and "scholars." The reasoning is presumably for inclusivity -- there may be a student who has no gender identity -- and that adults should not impose a gender identity on young people.

--In a New York Times op-ed column, a professor of philosophy noted his shock at learning that most young Americans do not believe that moral truths exist. They are incapable of asserting that anything, including killing for fun, is wrong beyond personal opinion.

These are all inevitable consequences of the death of belief in God and Judeo-Christian values, and of the Bible as society's primary moral reference work.

The West has been in moral decline since World War I, the calamity that led to World War II and the death of national identity and Christianity in most of Europe.

There has always been one exception: the United States. But now that is ending. The seeds of America's decline have been sown since the beginning of the 20th century, and they came to fruition with the post-World War II generation, the baby boomers.

Radical and aggressive secularism and atheism have replaced religion in virtually every school and throughout American public life.

We have gone from President Abraham Lincoln reading the Bible every day to Alaska Airlines feeling forced to stop passing out prayer cards with meals. In a hundred years, we've gone from near-total biblical literacy to near-total biblical illiteracy. One wonders whether half of America's college seniors could correctly identify Cain and Abel, or whether more than 1 in 10 Americans could cite the Ten Commandments. We have gone from President Franklin D. Roosevelt proclaiming the need to save "Christian civilization" in World War II speeches to a virtual ban on American presidents mentioning the word "Christianity." And, as is widely noted, Americans are no longer supposed to wish strangers "merry Christmas," and they must refer to a Christmas party as a "holiday party."

The prices that we Americans and Europeans are paying for creating the first godless societies in recorded history amount to civilizational suicide. Boys and girls are not to be referred to as boys and girls; Western elites dismiss national identity as protofascism; the belief that moral truth exists has been destroyed and replaced by feelings and opinions; fewer people are marrying; and more people live alone than at any time in American history.

Western European countries have become empty, soulless places. They are pretty and appear materially secure (for now), but they stand for almost nothing (except "multiculturalism" and "tolerance"). They have replaced a Jewish population that overwhelmingly wanted to assimilate with a Muslim population that does not want to. And nearly all European countries are headed to Greece-like insolvency as fewer and fewer workers pay enough in taxes to support those who collect welfare, and as tensions with their Muslim inhabitants increase.

But the good news is that now, beginning with Italy and New York, citizens can watch each other masturbate or urinate in public.

There is no way to prove that God exists. But what is provable is what happens when societies stop believing in God: They commit suicide.

Churches in the People’s Republic of Massachusetts have grave concerns about a new anti-discrimination law that could force congregations to accommodate the transgender community – under the threat of fines and jail time.

The law, which goes into effect in October, does not specifically mention churches or other houses of worship. However, the attorney general, along with the government commission assigned to enforce the law, have a different point of view.

“Even a church could be seen as a place of public accommodation if it holds a secular event, such as a spaghetti supper, that is open to the general public,” the document states. “All persons, regardless of gender identity, shall have the right to the full and equal accommodations, advantages, facilities and privileges of any place of public accommodation.”

July 19, 2016

If there were a contest for the most stupid idea in politics, my choice would be the assumption that people would be evenly or randomly distributed in incomes, institutions, occupations or awards, in the absence of somebody doing somebody wrong.

Political crusades, bureaucratic empires and lucrative personal careers as grievance mongers have been built on the foundation of that assumption, which is almost never tested against any facts.

A recent article in the New York Times saw as a problem the fact that females are greatly under-represented among the highest rated chess players. Innumerable articles, TV stories and political outcries have been based on an "under-representation" of women in Silicon Valley, seen as a problem that needs to be solved.

Are there girls out there dying to play chess, who find the doors slammed shut in their faces? Are there women with Ph.D.s in computer science from M.I.T. and Cal Tech who get turned away when they apply for jobs in Silicon Valley?

Are girls and boys not allowed to have different interests? If girls had the same interest in chess as boys had, but were banned from chess clubs, that would be something very different from their not choosing to play chess as often as boys do. As for chess ratings, that is not subjective. It is based on which players, with which ratings, you have won against and lost to.

Are women and men not to be allowed to make different decisions as to how they choose to spend their time and live their lives?

Chess is not the only endeavor which can take a huge chunk of time out of your life, and unremitting efforts, to reach the top. If you want to become a top scientist, a partner in a big law firm or a top executive in a major corporation, you are very unlikely to do it working from 9 to 5, or taking a few years off, here and there, to have children and raise them.

Applying the same unsubstantiated assumption to differences in "representation" between different racial and ethnic groups likewise produces many loudly expressed grievances, political crusades, and millions of dollars from lawsuits charging discrimination -- all without a speck of evidence beyond numbers that do not match the prevailing assumptions.

People who base their conclusions on hard facts often reach very different conclusions than those who base their conclusions on the preconception that outcomes would be even or random in the absence of somebody treating somebody wrong.

Something as simple as age differences among groups can doom any assumption of even or random outcomes.

If every 20-year-old Puerto Rican in the United States had an income identical with the income of every 20-year-old Japanese American -- and identical incomes at every other age -- Japanese Americans as a group would still have a higher average income than Puerto Ricans in the United States. That is because the median age of Japanese Americans is more than 20 years older.

People with 20 years more work experience usually make higher incomes. And age difference is just one of many differences between groups.

You can study innumerable groups in countries around the world today, or over centuries of recorded history, without finding a single example of the even or random outcomes that are used as a benchmark for determining discrimination.

Nevertheless, courts of law -- including the Supreme Court of the United States -- use something that has never been found anywhere as a norm to which current realities are to be compared. Billions of dollars, in the aggregate, have changed hands as a result of individual lawsuits charging discrimination.

Life is undoubtedly unfair. But that is not the same as saying that the unfairness occurred wherever the statistics were collected. The origins of this unfairness often go back to different childhood environments for individuals or different geographic or cultural settings for groups and nations.

These differences between nations, as well as differences between individuals and groups, reflect the fact that the world "has never been a level playing field," as economic historian David S. Landes put it. Renowned historian Fernand Braudel said, "In no society have all regions and all parts of the population developed equally."

How long will we continue to take something that has never happened, and never had much chance of happening, as a norm?

June 23, 2016

Concerning entitlements, an issue that’s fallen by the wayside since the horrific Orlando attacks, there’s more bad news. Social Security will dole out additional money to beneficiaries. Is that a good thing? Not really—it’s only increasing by a whopping $2.50, whichThe Associated Press aptly noted is enough to maybe buy a gallon of gas. It’s Medicare; that’s where the cliff becomes more apparent after 10 years (via AP):

Meanwhile, Medicare is expected to go bankrupt sooner than expected - 12 years from now. And some beneficiaries could face higher monthly premiums next year.

The annual report from the trustees of the government's two bedrock retirement programs warned that politically gridlocked Washington needs to act sooner, rather than later, to shore up finances and avoid upending the lives of millions of retirees and their families.

Social Security's trust funds are expected to be depleted in 2034, unchanged from the trustees' projection a year ago. Medicare's trust fund for inpatient care will be exhausted in 2028, two years earlier than previously projected.

If Congress allows either fund to run dry, millions of Americans living on fixed incomes would face steep cuts in benefits.…

After Social Security's trust funds are depleted, the program would collect enough in payroll taxes to pay only 79 percent of benefits.

Medicare's problem is more immediate, and more complicated, because health care costs can change in unpredictable ways.

Friendly reminder that 10,000 baby boomers today, tomorrow, and over the next two decades become eligible for their states’ respective Medicare and Social Security rolls. The ship of state sees the iceberg ahead—and we’re going to hit it unless we do something. For now, nothing is going to happen because Democrats are confused as to who was responsible for the Orlando attack. A radicalized young Muslim man, who pledged allegiance to ISIS during the shooting, perpetrated it. Yet, the anti-gun Left feels that guns are the issue, and the AR-15 rifle, which wasn’t even used in the attack, has to go.

June 01, 2016

White teenage unemployment is about 14 percent. That for black teenagers is about 30 percent. The labor force participation rate for white teens is 37 percent, and that for black teens is 25 percent. Many years ago, in 1948, the figures were exactly the opposite. The unemployment rate of black 16-year-old and 17-year-old males was 9.4 percent, while that of whites was 10.2 percent. Up until the late 1950s, black teens, as well as black adults, were more active in the labor market than their white counterparts. I will return to these facts after I point out some elitist arrogance and moral bankruptcy.

Supporters of a $15 minimum wage are now admitting that there will be job losses. "Why shouldn't we in fact accept job loss?" asks New School economics and urban policy professor David Howell, adding, "What's so bad about getting rid of crappy jobs, forcing employers to upgrade, and having a serious program to compensate anyone who is in the slightest way harmed by that?" Economic Policy Institute economist David Cooper says: "It could be that they spend more time unemployed, but their income is higher overall. If you were to tell me I could work fewer hours and make as much or more than I could have previously, that would be OK."

What's a "crappy job"? My guess is that many of my friends and I held the jobs Howell is talking about as teenagers during the late 1940s and '50s. During summers, we arose early to board farm trucks to New Jersey to pick blueberries. I washed dishes and mopped floors at Philadelphia'sHorn & Hardart restaurant, helped unload trucks at Campbell Soup, shoveled snow, swept out stores, delivered packages and did similar low-skill, low-wage jobs. If today's arrogant elite were around to destroy these jobs through wage legislation and regulation, I doubt whether I and many other black youths would have learned the habits of work that laid the foundation for future success. Today's elite have little taste for my stepfather's admonition: Any kind of a job is better than begging and stealing.

What's so tragic about all of this is that black leadership buys into it. What the liberals have in mind when they say there should be "a serious program to compensate anyone who is in the slightest way harmed" is that people who are thrown out of work should be given welfare or some other handout to make them whole. This experimentation with minimum wages on the livelihoods of low-skilled workers is ethically atrocious.

In the first paragraph, I pointed out that black youths had lower unemployment during earlier times. How might that be explained? It would be sheer lunacy to attempt to explain the more favorable employment statistics by suggesting that during earlier periods, blacks faced less racial discrimination. Similarly, it would be lunacy to suggest that black youths had higher skills than white youths. What best explain the loss of teenage employment opportunities, particularly those of black teenagers, are increases in minimum wage laws. There's little dispute within the economics profession that higher minimum wages discriminate against the employment of the least skilled workers, and that demographic is disproportionately represented by black teenagers.

President Barack Obama, the Congressional Black Caucus, black state and local politicians, and civil rights organizations are neither naive nor stupid. They have been made aware of the unemployment effects of the labor laws they support; however, they are part of a political coalition. In order to get labor unions, environmental groups, business groups and other vested interests to support their handout agenda and make campaign contributions, they must give political support to what these groups want. They must support minimum wage increases even though it condemns generations of black youths to high unemployment rates.

I can't imagine what black politicians and civil rights groups are getting in return for condemning black youths to a high rate of unemployment and its devastating effects on upward economic mobility that makes doing so worthwhile, but then again, I'm not a politician.

May 29, 2016

Fox Business’ Elizabeth McDonald has obtained some horrifying footage of hungry Venezuelans eating from the garbage, as the nation continues its death spiral brought on by a dependence on oil and socialist tendencies. In April, the nation’s chamber of food noted that food producers had about 15 days of inventory left. Mass looting of supermarkets has ensued. It’s become so bad that there are reports of Venezuelans hunting dogs, cats, and birds for sustenance. Rolling blackouts are common, which has had an impact on hospitals, which lack basic medical supplies, including soap and gloves. Things have become so bad that dead and dying babies are becoming the norm.

Now, on top of hungry Venezuelans prying into trashcans, the nation could be on the verge of defaulting on its massive debt (via Fox Business):

People in the nation’s capital, Caracas, have resorted to eating and fighting over old food thrown away in garbage bags outside shopping malls where restaurants are located.

"They're ripping through garbage bags searching for food, the government says this is not happening, but we are very hungry here in Venezuela," says a male bystander on camera. A local says: "We are starving, we are eating dog food and food meant for farm animals."

Another video shows drivers in Venezuela pulling over to join in the ambush and looting off grocery trucks. That is what happened on the national highway to Puerto Ordaz, in southern Venezuela, where the country's largest oil reserve and a major steel operation is located. The National Guard is shown on camera standing back, not doing anything.

"People are starving, the last resort for them is to loot and steal rice," one bystander says on camera. "The National Guard is here but no one is paying any attention to them at all, they're letting it happen."

[…]

The situation in Venezuela is growing more desperate by the hour as its unraveling socialist economy is trapped in a debt vice. The collapse in oil prices has Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro, the handpicked successor of Hugo Chavez, desperately fighting to avoid a default on its $185 billion in debt. Wall Street and government sources indicate that would be the largest default in history, with Venezuela’s debt about double the roughly $100 billion in debt Argentina had when it defaulted in 2001. Estimates of the amount of assets and reserves remaining in Venezuela that could be used to pay back its debt have ranged from Bank of America Corp.’s $50 billion to as low as Nomura Holdings’ $10 billion. Venezuela’s foreign reserves have sunk to their lowest levels in 13 years.

Police have fired teargas at protesters calling for the resignation of the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, and shut down swaths of central Caracas to control the demonstrations, as the Caribbean nation slid deeper into political crisis.

Wednesday’s protests came the day after Maduro said the opposition-controlled parliament had become irrelevant and predicted that it might soon “disappear”, as his political enemies upped pressure for a referendum to force the leader from office.…

If Maduro can put off a referendum until next year, losing would have a more limited impact. If he is ousted this year, it would trigger an election, while next year it would simply allow his deputy to take over power.

For now, Maduro has the upper hand, because the supreme court and election authorities are broadly supportive of his government, and can overrule parliament on the state of emergency and obstruct efforts to organise a recall vote.

But the opposition parties who took control of parliament with a landslide victory in December elections have warned Maduro against using his powers to ignore popular discontent.

Yet, socialist cronies or not, no one is going to stand for children being robbed in broad daylight. The Atlanticcharted the harrowing decline of the country, which has impacted almost every aspect of its socioeconomic structure. The capital of Caracas is now a crime-ridden haven akin to John Carpenter’s Escape from New York:

…the Venezuelan government can no longer afford to provide even rudimentary law and order, making Caracas, the capital, by some calculations one of the most murderous cities in the world. Drug traffickers run large sections of the countryside. Prison gang leaders keep military-style weapons on hand, and while grenade attacks still make the news, they are nothing new. Recently, the police captured an AT4 antitank rocket launcher—basically, a bazooka—from a suspect.

The breakdown of law and order is so severe that even children are being robbed. At Nuestra Señora del Carmen school in El Cortijo, a struggling neighborhood of Caracas, supplies for the school-lunch program have been stolen twice this year already: Thugs have broken into the school’s pantry late at night after fresh food is delivered. The second burglary meant the school couldn’t feed the kids for at least a week.

So, when criminals raid school pantries due to a lack of food because the grand experiment of 21st century socialism has completely and utterly failed, don’t expect the people to just let things slide, even with a state of emergency. Besides food, people don’t have electricity or basic medical supplies. And now kids are being robbed. We shouldn’t expect this to end well.

May 17, 2016

We know that Venezuela’s headlong plunge into the socialist experiment has turned into a total nightmare. Food shortages have led to mass looting and the eating of dogs, cats, and pigeons to abate the wave of hunger that’s set in, as supermarkets are not being regularly stocked. The Venezuelan Chamber of Food reported on April 27 that the country’s producers only have about 15 days worth of inventory left. Toilet paper is now a luxury item, and the rolling blackouts from the energy shortage is also a major problem, especially for those working in the hospitals. Right now, there’s an appalling lack of medical supplies, and babies are dying in maternity wards. Can the socialist government help? Well, that depends if you can reach them, as they’ve shortened workweeks to only two days to save energy. In the meantime, Venezuelans are dying (via NYT):

The day had begun with the usual hazards: chronic shortages of antibiotics, intravenous solutions, even food. Then a blackout swept over the city, shutting down the respirators in the maternity ward.

Doctors kept ailing infants alive by pumping air into their lungs by hand for hours. By nightfall, four more newborns had died.

“The death of a baby is our daily bread,” said Dr. Osleidy Camejo, a surgeon in the nation’s capital, Caracas, referring to the toll from Venezuela’s collapsing hospitals.…

At the University of the Andes Hospital in the mountain city of Mérida, there was not enough water to wash blood from the operating table. Doctors preparing for surgery cleaned their hands with bottles of seltzer water.

“It is like something from the 19th century,” said Dr. Christian Pino, a surgeon at the hospital.

The figures are devastating. The rate of death among babies under a month old increased more than a hundredfold in public hospitals run by the Health Ministry, to just over 2 percent in 2015 from 0.02 percent in 2012, according to a government report provided by lawmakers.

The rate of death among new mothers in those hospitals increased by almost five times in the same period, according to the report.…

Here in the Caribbean port town of Barcelona, two premature infants died recently on the way to the main public clinic because the ambulance had no oxygen tanks. The hospital has no fully functioning X-ray or kidney dialysis machines because they broke long ago. And because there are no open beds, some patients lie on the floor in pools of their blood.

Yet even among Venezuela’s failing hospitals, Luis Razetti Hospital in Barcelona has become one of the most notorious.…

Samuel Castillo, 21, arrived in the emergency room needing blood. But supplies had run out. A holiday had been declared by the government to save electricity, and the blood bank took donations only on workdays. Mr. Castillo died that night.

For the past two and a half months, the hospital has not had a way to print X-rays. So patients must use a smartphone to take a picture of their scans and take them to the proper doctor.

The Times also added that basic items, like soap and gloves, have vanished from these medical facilities. Yet, this medical catastrophe has been festering since the death of Hugo Chavez. The UK-basedChannel 4 News reported in July of 2015 that the same lack of medical supplies, including bags to take out human waste, were lacking at Venezuela’s hospitals. Rising inflation have led to doctors only making £10 a month. That’s a little over $14. So, with that meager wage, it’s not entirely shocking that 10,000 doctors have left Venezuela since 2010.

The real culprit is chavismo, the ruling philosophy named for Chavez and carried forward by Maduro, and its truly breathtaking propensity for mismanagement (the government plowed state money arbitrarily into foolish investments); institutional destruction (as Chavez and then Maduro became more authoritarian and crippled the country’s democratic institutions); nonsense policy-making (like price and currency controls); and plain thievery (as corruption has proliferated among unaccountable officials and their friends and families).

A case in point is the price controls, which have expanded to apply to more and more goods: food and vital medicines, yes, but also car batteries, essential medical services, deodorant, diapers, and, of course, toilet paper. The ostensible goal was to check inflation and keep goods affordable for the poor, but anyone with a basic grasp of economics could have foreseen the consequences: When prices are set below production costs, sellers can’t afford to keep the shelves stocked. Official prices are low, but it’s a mirage: The products have disappeared.

With people suffering from chronic medical conditions, like epilepsy, the search for critical medicines to help with symptoms is now akin to finding a unicorn. In the case of Maikel Mancilla Peña, The Atlantic added that this journey ended in his death after his mother wasn’t able to find the anti-convulsion drugs necessary to help him with his seizures:

At 14 years old, Maikel Mancilla Peña had been battling epilepsy for six years. His condition was under control, just about, thanks to a common anti-convulsive prescription drug called Lamotrigine. It had long been a struggle for his family to get it, but as the gap between the real cost of the drugs and the maximum pharmacies were allowed to charge for them grew, it became impossible to find them.

On February 11th this year, Maikel’s mom Yamaris gave him the last Lamotrigine tablet in their stash. None of Yamaris’s usual pharmacies had any anti-convulsants in stock. She worked social media— which in Venezuela these days is filled with desperate people trying to source scarce medicines—but no luck. She drove hours to track down a lead, but came up empty-handed.

In the following days, Maikel experienced a series of increasingly violent epileptic seizures, as his family watched helplessly. On February 20th, he suffered respiratory failure and died.

At a time when the country needs government services the most, they’re only working two days a week. The people are hungry, law and order has broken down, the hospitals are disaster zones, and the nation is so broke it can’t even print its own currency. Over a trillion dollars have been spent on 21st century socialism. It’s done nothing but made scores of people hungry, unable to seek proper medical care, and increased infant mortality to egregious levels. Socialism kills people. Full stop.

Venezuela’s economic catastrophe is getting worse by the day. The energy shortage has created rolling blackouts; government has shortened workweeks to two days, and the level of hunger that has arisen from the country’s inability to provide has led to lootingand now locals are hunting dogs, cats, and birds for food. In all, 21st century socialism has evolved into a total nightmare. Venezuela is literally at a point where the country is so broke it can’t print its own currency. Government food dispensaries are being ransacked. At a wholesale market in Maracay, 5,000 people stormed the establishment, marking a week of looting that left two people dead and millions of dollars worth of damage (via PanAm Post):

Venezuela saw a new wave of looting this week that resulted in at least two deaths, countless wounded, and millions of dollars in losses and damages.

On the morning of Wednesday, May 11, a crowd sacked the Maracay Wholesale Market in the central region of Venezuela.

According to the testimonies of merchants, the endless food lines that Venezuelans have been enduring to do groceries could not be organized that day.

As time went by, desperate Venezuelans grew anxious over not being able to buy food. Then they started jumping over the gates.

Lootings are becoming a common occurrence in Venezuela, as the country’s food shortage resulted in yet another reported incident of violence in a supermarket — this time in the Luvebras Automarket located in the La Florida Province of Caracas.

Videos posted to social media showed desperate people falling over each other trying to get bags of rice. One user claimed the looting occurred because it is difficult to get cereal, and so people “broke down the doors and damaged infrastructure.”

In the central province of Carabobo, residents ransacked a corn warehouse located in the coastal city of Puerto Cabello. They reportedly broke down the gate because workers were giving away small portions.

Yohan, like the approximately 50 other people asking employees to give her a “little bit” of corn to feed her children for breakfast, was turned away.

While food shortages are pervasive, so is the lack of medical supplies. Babies dying in hospitals and people dying from serious medical conditions, like epilepsy, are becoming more frequent occurrences. So, take a bow Chavistas—you’ve totally destroyed the country.

May 10, 2016

So, you know Venezuela is on the verge of economic collapse. The price of oil has dropped precipitously over the past few years—that’s a budgetary nightmare for a nation dependent on its oil exports. As a result, basic necessities, like toilet paper, are being rationed. There’s limited access to television and long distance phone service. There are rolling blackouts due to energy shortages. And now the government is cutting back the workweek to just two days. This comes at a time when Venezuela’s citizens need government services the most. Supermarkets are not stocked regularly, so there’s a food shortage; people are starving. They’ve resorted to looting to survive. You would think that the government can’t really afford to print its own currency because it’s so broke would be the cherry on top of this socialist nightmare. Nope—the hunger games appear to have begun, as Venezuelans are now hunting stray dogs, cats, and pigeons for sustenance (via PanAm Post):

Ramón Muchacho, Mayor of Chacao in Caracas, said the streets of the capital of Venezuela are filled with people killing animals for food.

Through Twitter, Muchacho reported that in Venezuela, it is a “painful reality” that people “hunt cats, dogs and pigeons” to ease their hunger.

People are also reportedly gathering vegetables from the ground and trash to eat as well.

The crisis in Venezuela is worsening everyday due in part to shortages reaching 70 percent. This to go along with the world’s highest level of inflation.

The population’s desperation has begun to show, with looting and robberies for food increasing all the time. This Sunday, May 1, six Venezuelan military officials were arrested for stealing goats to ease their hunger, as there was no food at the Fort Manaure military base.…

The Venezuelan Chamber of Food (Cavidea) said many businesses only have 15 days worth of inventory. Production has been effected as a result of a shortage of raw materials, as well as exhausted national and international supply resources.

Just when you thought this left wing dystopia couldn’t get any worse—it does.

“Health insurance premiums continue to rise for American families,” wrote the authors of the EOP report. “Premiums are rising in all states and far in excess of wage growth or inflation. If we do nothing, the soaring rise of health insurance premiums will mean that millions of families and businesses will be unable to afford these increases and will lose their coverage over the coming years. For families that manage to keep their health insurance, health costs will consume an increasingly large portion of their budgets.”

The EOP report called for substantial reforms Obama said would lower costs and increase access to quality health care services, including a ban on pre-existing condition restrictions.

More than six years have passed since the EOP report was released and the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was signed into law. A new analysis by Freedom Partners shows the promises and projections made by EOP in 2009 have not come to fruition. In fact, health insurance premiums continue to grow at rates similar to those experienced before ACA and wage growth has actually slowed. Between 2004 and 2009, average wages increased by 12.2 percent; since 2009, wages have risen by less than 9 percent.

In addition to rising premiums and falling wage growth, deductibles have also grown in recent years. According to data made available by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and analyzed by Freedom Partners, only five states and Washington, DC, saw average Obamacare exchange deductibles decrease from 2015 to 2016. Twenty-one states had average Obamacare deductibles rise by $300 or more, including eight states with deductible increases topping $500.

Lower-cost “Bronze” plans experienced the most significant deductible increases, hurting lower- and middle-income families. Average Bronze plan deductibles fell from 2015 to 2016 in only two states: Alaska and Arkansas. In 34 states, Bronze plan deductibles rose by at least $500.

There’s no denying the fact millions of Americans are now enrolled in Medicaid and Medicare or are receiving federal subsidies in an Obamacare health insurance exchange. But at what cost? If the mission of health care reform is to make tens of millions of people pay significantly more, have access to fewer health insurance options, be forced to purchase a product some people don’t want, and be required to contribute their hard-earned money toward health care services they are morally opposed to, then Obamacare has been a great success. This isn’t what effective health care reform looks like.

Instead of mandating how people live their lives, artificially manipulating health care markets, and raising taxes on an already over-taxed populace, pro-liberty health care reform gives more options, not less. It empowers states with the funding and freedoms they need to enact policies best designed to help the poor in their own local communities. It gives people the ability to purchase the health insurance they want rather than force them to buy from a select few options many people don’t need. It gives people the ability, using ground-breaking reforms such as health savings accounts, to save for their own health care instead of being forced to go through third-party insurance companies. It also doesn’t ask people to violate their deeply held personal or religious beliefs.

Pro-liberty health care reform ensures the nation’s most impoverished people are taken care of, but it also guarantees each person has the freedom to seek out the highest quality care possible and guarantees health care providers have the liberty they need to pursue the kind of innovation that has made the United States the most medically advanced nation in world history.

We’ll all hear of heroic world leaders who joined together in Paris to ensure the planet’s survival. The Obama administration will try to enforce the agreement (which meets all the legal criteria of a treaty though the President chooses not to call it that to evade Senate disapproval) by imposing the Environmental Protection Agency’s controversial “Clean Power Plan” (CPP), which aims to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from U.S. power plants by 32% by 2030, and other onerous regulations that will drive up utility rates.

What we won’t hear much about are the Americans harmed by the rising energy prices the policies cause.

The higher rates will affect all Americans, but the impoverished and working poor will suffer most. Many already experience “energy poverty,” in which a household spends 10 percent or more of its income on household energy costs (excluding gasoline and other transportation-related costs). Many others will be driven into it.

A study by scholars at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that a policy imposing a CO2 tax or cap-and-trade regime (and the CPP allows states to use either or both) would impose higher costs nationwide. States that currently get more energy from fossil fuels would face smaller increases, and those that currently get less would face larger increases.

The lower you push CO2 emissions, the more expensive it is to generate electricity. Not surprisingly, richer people can afford more expensive things than poorer people. That includes energy. Consequently, the poorer you are, the less likely you are to choose more expensive energy sources.

Richer states, like the Pacific Coast, New England, and New York (which averaged $46,954 per capita in income in 2012, one-tenth more than the national average), have already pushed their CO2 emissions down somewhat. Poorer states, like South Central States, Texas, and Mountain States (which averaged $36,854 per capita in income, 14% lower than the national average and more than a fifth lower than those richer states), have not.

Because the poor spend a higher percentage of their incomes on energy in the first place, an increase in energy prices—which implementation of the CPP and the Paris climate agreement would cause—will cause disproportionately heavy harm to them, ironically functioning as if it were a regressive tax.

Although on average Colorado families spent just 8% of their after-tax incomes on energy in 2013, the 879,000 Colorado families with income under $50,000 per year spent more than twice as much, an average of 17%, and the 128,000 families earning under $10,000 per year spent more than seven times as much, an average of 57%. For the average family, a 10% increase in energy prices would push energy costs to 8.8% of after-tax income; for the family earning under $10,000, that same increase in energy prices would push energy costs to a crushing 62.3%.

While on average Florida families spent 0% of their after-tax incomes on energy in 2013, the 3.9 million households with annual income under $50,000 spent nearly twice as much, an average of 19%, and the 587,000 families earning under $10,000 per year spent nearly seven times as much, 68%. For the average family, a 10% increase in energy prices would push energy costs to 11% of after-tax income; for the family earning under $10,000, that same increase in energy prices would push energy costs to 74.6%.

The average Iowa family spent 11% of after-tax income on energy in 2013. The 600,000 Iowa families with under $50,000 in annual income spent on average 19%, while 80,000 Iowa families with annual incomes under $10,000 spent on average 69%—more than six times the average. For the average family, a 10% increase in energy prices would push energy costs to 12.1% of after-tax income; for the family earning under $10,000, that same increase in energy prices would push energy costs to 75.9%.

To comprehend the impact of EPA’s proposed new rule on America’s poorest, just imagine what it would be like to have to spend three-fourths of your household income on energy, leaving only one-fourth for food, clothing, shelter, transportation, health care, education, and everything else combined.

That’s why we should mourn, not celebrate, implementation of the Paris climate agreement on Earth Day.